Lay Me Down by Erin Kellison Page B

would belong to me. I’d be the mayor, if you will. You’d put your talents at my disposal.”
    She’d heard enough. “No. Why would you think anyone would agree to this?”
    “Well, I had planned on motivating you with your sister, Jordan. But she got away and sent the son of one of my business associates deep into the…Scrape.”
    Vince Blackman. Right. He’d tried to romance Jordan into going off with him. Somewhere, probably in this very house, his father Raymond was held captive. Well, Steve could rescue him, too.
    Any time now would be good.
    “I’m going to have your city,” Lambert said, “whether you concede it or not. If you cooperate, you will be comfortable. If you don’t, you won’t.”
    Comfort was subjective. She was far from comfortable right now, and they were still playing nice. If she couldn’t run, she’d have to fight. She’d have to hold out until Steve came for her. The twenty-four hours now seemed like a century.
    Every nerve was burning with the certainty that if she didn’t do something, Lambert was going to keep her prisoner for the rest of her life. She scanned his desk for a weapon—smack him with his palm-sized onyx globe? Stab him with a pen?
    She brought her gaze back up to his smug face…and she stopped breathing, surprised.
    How weird….
    She was looking at a dream version of Lambert. In fact, she must’ve been looking at a dream version of him for the duration of their conversation.
    Revelers did it all the time Darkside—pumped themselves up, shed weight, grew taller, developed fuller, perkier boobs—remade their appearance into fantasy versions of themselves. Maisie had never altered herself because it was too much of a pain in the ass to concentrate on looking different while illegally crossing boundaries. She was more of a come-as-you-are kind of girl.
    But she’d never heard of anyone being able to alter his or her appearance in the waking world. She was awake, but looking at a dream.
    Could she see past it?
    Yes. Dear God.
    “The last dreamscape I took over,” Lambert was saying, “my host put up a valiant fight. The dream itself became a battlefield.”
    Maisie remembered the battlefield. Remembered the overpowering feeling of evil and death.
    More disturbing, if possible, was the man standing before her, his dream-tooled illusion no longer fooling her sight. Apparently, not having his own dreamscape wasn’t the only abnormality with which he’d been born.
    He had freaky eyes. The irises were gray, but a little too large in diameter to be normal, and there was no differentiation where the irises met his pupils.
    “Why did you need the old man in the package you had me deliver?”
    Lambert looked over at Graeme and said, laughing, “I knew she would open it!”   Then he smiled down at her. “I was going to introduce myself to you. And then I was going to show you how to keep les cauchemars , the nightmares, away from my city. You feed them dreamers.”
    His city? “Did you feed them Raymond Blackman?”
    “He was useful in that way, yes.”
    She was going to be sick. “Well, I don’t have any nightmares in my city.”
    “They exist. They will find it.” He gave another of his slight smiles. “They will find us. ”
    He had to be referring to the kind of creature Jordan and Rook had fought.
    And there was no us. “It’s not my fault you don’t have a dreamscape of your own.”
    “It’s not my fault, either,” he said. “I will fight you, Maze. And I am stronger than you are. I will overcome.”
    “Not in this life,” she vowed.
    “No,” he answered. “In the Darkside one.”
    Maisie had never been drowned into sleep, though she’d pushed others once or twice to get out of a tight spot.
    The sensation was what she’d expect of drowning in waking world waters. Being held under, breathless, out of control, panicked. Last night Steve had merely assisted with a fall into sleep, but this descent was like being bound and gagged and thrown